Considering how borked I was the night before and considering the hour that I actually set out, even with the lack of fiddly twiddly detours happening, it's really quite impressive how many kilometers I crank out.
Of the pairable Bluetooth speakers, the orange one is the one that likes to stop charging and just turn off on account of running out of battery. Predictably, this means it's the black speaker whose on/off button stops working.
I start the day with breakfast noodles and milky coffee at the trucker restaurant next door to my hotel. From a logistics point of view, I usually only doctor my coffee with shelf-stable low-weight items (like honey¹), but yesterday's hotel gave me two boxes of milk and some packaged cakes of the type that taste aaamazing when bonking (and terrible the rest of the time), and I've still got the Baileys Irish Creme gifted to me by Yana and the Opera Chocolate Liqueur² that was a birthday gift from Humberto, so today's a morning for fancy coffee.
Morning view from my hotel room, a glimpse of what this main road used to look like
It's quite an uninteresting ride into Yangjiang City. Even once I'm in the city and it's no longer specifically a Truck Route, it's still a main thoroughfare of the type with traffic lights timed to 45kph cycles³.
The starred point of interest in the city is a Martyrs Memorial Park that I remember being very, very unimpressed by in 2019. Unstarred is a pagoda that I point my GPS at, only to find it up the top of a steep hill that I declined to climb four years ago. Oddly enough, as I was getting to within a block or two of the park, I crossed a road and had a powerful Deja Vu sensation that I wrote off as southern Chinese city roads from the mid-70s, all having a certain similarity to each other... except that once I got to the park below the pagoda, it now seems as if that wave of familiarity came to me on the corner where I must have stood when adjusting my GPS⁴ to the next location.
With a brief reprieve at a hipster café for a dusty-tasting Americano, I'm back on a more nasty main thoroughfare turning back into Truck Route until I get to the marked Scenic Byway I'll be on for most of the rest of the day.
I declined to try their drink made with unpreserved olives. I wanted to try their coconut water drink, but they were out of coconut water.
In theory, my destination is the town of Xinzhou, but I'll get there with so much sunlight left to me that an extra 17km in order to save 50y on my bookable online hotel room⁵ seems a reasonable trade-off. Obviously, this is because I've forgotten that there's a short but very steep mountlet⁶ before the next town.
With delays to make a video about a late Qing village gate and to inch my way down the mountlet, praying that my sweat-soaked grip won't slide off the brakes, I get into town just as it's beginning to be a good idea to think about pulling out a headlight, eat a dinner of fried noodles, and accidentally try to check-in at the hotel next door to mine.
I think this place wins an award for the Most Something of the Year. I'm not sure what thing that something is, but this is definitely the most of it.
¹ I used to carry 200ml boxes of UHT whipping cream, but without a companion, it is very nearly impossible to go through that much cream in a single day. Also—as discovered in 2020—hot weather cycling + UHT cream = boxes of butter. ² Both decanted into road-safe plastic bottles ³ Although this means they also work for "all greens" at 90kph, it doesn't at all mean that they do at 15kph. ⁴ 2019 was the first Tour where paper Maps were completely secondary to my navigation, and a robotic voice periodically interrupted my music to tell me where to go. ⁵ While it's possible that the walk-in and ask hotels will be cheaper, it's not confirmed, and in the event of the No Foreigners treatment, I want my room already booked and paid for. ⁶ A mountlet is like a mountain only smaller
